How do I get one of those internet things?

[jaydee81]

Hey, this is one of those advice threads. I've never had the internet in my flat, but my female companion is moving in at the end of next month, so I need a phone line, an internet service provider and any other advice?
Little help?

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Ring BT. They will charge you £130 to get a phone line set up, so get your readies..ready. They might help throw in some internet for that price too, but don't bank on it.

I guess another option would be cable with Virgin, but that can be very problematic indeed in flats.

[SetToStun]

Ring BT. They will charge you £130 to get a phone line set up, so get your readies..ready. They might help throw in some internet for that price too, but don't bank on it.

I guess another option would be cable with Virgin, but that can be very problematic indeed in flats.

When I had the BT line set up at my flat they waived the connection charge because I signed up for a minimum of one year. If I'd cancelled or switched provider during that year I'd have had to stump up the £130 (or whatever it was back then) of course, but it saved me shelling out up front. If the physical line is already in place and it's only an exchange connection that's needed, jaydee could get similarly lucky.

But yes, to answer jaydee's original question: what Shoulders said. Get onto BT and get it sorted. As far as the internet connection goes, it looks like the actual price of a good package seems to have gone up rather than down over the last few years - unless you bundle up your TV service, phone line rental and internet into one package, as far as I can see. For that reason, in my current place I went with BT for the broadband too. Good service so far, no complaints, reasonable price and a funky little home hub thingy in the corner.

[Uncle TechTip]

If you sign up to 12-month contract with BT they will waive the extortionate connection fee. But all that's doing is splitting out an equivalent charge over the year.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Oh and I forgot to add wireless internet is fucking amazing and makes you feel like a God.

[SetToStun]

Wireless - that's the other thing. If you sign up with BT for broadband and you have a sufficiently fast line, they will slice off a small percentage of your line whenever you can spare it and open it up to any other BT subscriber who happens to be in your area with a wireless device - they reckon you will never, ever notice it due to their very clever sharing system. If you live in a residential area outside of a town centre this means you'll almost never donate your line as passers by who sit on the pavement outside your gaff will be fairly rare, but when you visit town with your WiFi 'phone, iPad or laptop, you can usually find a BT OpenZone or Fon spot. It's great :-)

[alan nagsworth]

When you get the phone line set up, I suggest you go with Be. Best ISP I've ever had.

[jaydee81]

Huh? I have to get an ISP as well as pay BT?

[eluc55]

Another vote for BE. They're great, quite frankly.

[Stanley Turbine]

Wireless - that's the other thing. If you sign up with BT for broadband and you have a sufficiently fast line, they will slice off a small percentage of your line whenever you can spare it and open it up to any other BT subscriber who happens to be in your area with a wireless device - they reckon you will never, ever notice it due to their very clever sharing system. If you live in a residential area outside of a town centre this means you'll almost never donate your line as passers by who sit on the pavement outside your gaff will be fairly rare, but when you visit town with your WiFi 'phone, iPad or laptop, you can usually find a BT OpenZone or Fon spot. It's great :-)

I think you have to specifically join BT Fon for your Internet connection to be shared, they don't do it without telling you.

[Lfbarfe]

Be and O2 are the same company, and are great if you're in an area where they've got their own kit in the exchange. Elsewhere, O2 is wholesale BT resold and it's good, but not unlimited. Jaydee81 - PM me your postcode. I'll tell you what you can get and who's best. You'll need the BT line no matter what, though.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Huh? I have to get an ISP as well as pay BT?

If you want to get the line set up it might be easier to go with BT as your Internet Service Provider. But because BT is in competition on ADSL broadband with other service providers, there is a bit of choice- but they all at some point go through the same BT service. So you can choose between a number of things. I've heard that Be are good too. However, you need the phone line set up and that involves going through BT. No choice there.

[Ambient Sheep]

Hmmm, there's been some (but by no means all) mild misinformation in this thread so far, unfortunately.  I'll try to summarise the situation as I understand it.


You have two choices for the basic phone line before we even talk about the internet: BT or Virgin.


If you're in a cable-enabled area, and you don't already have a Sky satellite dish, you might want to look at getting Virgin for everything (telephone, internet, multi-channel TV).  How good it is these days I don't know, and it partly depends on whether it used to be NTL or Telewest as to how good the internet service is, but it's supposed to be pretty good.  They can be a bit cuntish with their internet Fair Usage Policy last time I heard, though.

If you're in a cable-enabled area, but already have Sky, then it's probably 50/50 as to whether you want to go Virgin or BT for the telephone & internet.  Again, look at the package prices, I'm out of touch on what the best deals are these days (mainly because I myself have no choice given where we live, see below).


if you're not in a cable-enabled area, or you want to avoid Virgin, then yes, you have to get your phone line from BT.  What happens after that re. internet is more complicated, though.

If, like mine, no other company but BT has their equipment actually fitted in your local telephone exchange, then get your internet from BT.  You won't do better from anyone else in that situation, as in a BT-only exchange, all the other companies simply buy capacity wholesale from, er, BT Wholesale, and then sell it on to you.  So you're best off cutting out the middleman and going for BT Retail who, although they're not supposed to get preferential terms from their own wholesale arm, seem to manage to do so based on how much pisstaking their Fair Usage Policy allows compared to other people in that situation (e.g. 100GB/month rather than 30GB or 40GB).

However, if you're in the lucky position of having another company (usually Sky or Be) with their own equipment fitted inside the BT exchange that can talk directly down BT's copper to you (a practice known as LLU, Local Loop Unbundling), then you're quids-in.  By bypassing BT's exchange equipment and wholesale charges entirely (bar having to pay them a small amount for the rental of that last mile or two of copper, i.e. the Local Loop), these companies can offer you a much faster, better and generally less-restrictive internet experience.  As has been said above, Be seem to be the people of choice in this situation, especially if you're going to be torrenting bucketloads.  However I've heard good things about Sky too, and you can get a very competitive all-in satellite/phone/internet package from them.  But as I said, only do this if you can establish that they have their own equipment LLU'd at the exchange.

Whether your exchange has other companies available can be found out from various websites (e.g. this one that let you put a phone number, or in cases like yours, a postcode into them; which will tell you what's available on your line/in your area.  I expect this is what Lfbarfe is going to do for you.  :-)

[SetToStun]

I think you have to specifically join BT Fon for your Internet connection to be shared, they don't do it without telling you.

According to their site they do now - they didn't originally but by the time I signed up last year (around November/December time, I think), the sign-up for BT Unlimited customers automatically opts you in.

[Ambient Sheep]

By the way, if you do end up getting a BT Phone Line, do look into splashing out a bit extra every month for one of their packages that gives you unlimited talk time, either just evenings, evenings or weekends, or all day every day, depending on which flavour you go for,  If your female companion (congrats on the move, btw, hope it goes well) uses the phone very much at all, it's generally worth the money, the only thing is that you have to hang up and redial after every hour or they start charging you after that.

Also, their "hub phone" which you get as part of the package is brilliant - you get Caller ID for free (so we never give out our real landline number to anybody any more, we always point them towards the hub so we can see who's calling) and international calls are much much cheaper.  I can ring a friend of mine in Italy on it for about 3p/minute and she can Skype it back for something silly like 1.5p/minute.  There's also the BT FON thing someone mentioned earlier; unfortunately with only 2Mb/s to start with as we live out in the sticks, it's not really an option for us to lose a quarter of that to other people, but if we had a faster line I'd definitely go for it.  Similarly they do some sort of BT Vision video-on-demand thing which I haven't investigated for the same reason, but you might want to look at if you don't have Sky.  Or even if you do, as I know fuck all about how it compares.  :-)  Someone else here may know more.


Fake EDIT:

According to their site they do now - they didn't originally but by the time I signed up last year (around November/December time, I think), the sign-up for BT Unlimited customers automatically opts you in.

Hmmm, maybe we should do it after all -- is it really unnoticeable if nobody on the pavement uses it then?  'cos the way I read it originally, they permanently allocate 0.5Mb/s of your line to passers-by, and as I said above, with only 2.0Mb/s to start with, I wasn't having that.  But if it's dynamic, only being eaten when necessary, then maybe I'll consider it, 'cos it would certainly be useful to have in return when out and about.


Real EDIT:

Appropos of nothing, just to have a big moan, I just played with the nice interactive map version of that broadband checker, and discovered that the row of houses behind us get their connection from a different exchange entirely that's half the distance away and so provides 5.5Mb/s (7.0Mb/s with ADSL+) plus both Be & Sky LLU'd!!  Thanks BT!!!

[SetToStun]

Fake EDIT:

Hmmm, maybe we should do it after all -- is it really unnoticeable if nobody on the pavement uses it then?  'cos the way I read it originally, they permanently allocate 0.5Mb/s of your line to passers-by, and as I said above, with only 2.0Mb/s to start with, I wasn't having that.  But if it's dynamic, only being eaten when necessary, then maybe I'll consider it, 'cos it would certainly be useful to have in return when out and about.

Well, I'm not the heaviest of home users, to be perfectly honest, but at weekends when I'm downloading patches and updates, my download speed seems to have not dropped a bit and I'm still getting lightning-quick access, so I assume it's fine. Their own page which used to tell you it would be fine, you'd not notice it, honest guv, seems to have been modified to remove those promises but the lead-in link states quite clearly that it doesn't affect your service at all, so make of that what you will. However, my area is minimum 8Mb download so I can afford to lose a minor chunk if they're being a bit disingenuous; if I were on a 2Mb line I think I'd exercise extreme caution too. On the other hand, you should be able to opt out if it does have any impact so it might be worth searching for wireless access points when you're out and about to see if you would get any benefit from joining up.

That's me being definitive and helpful, right there. Make the most of it; equivocation might as well be my middle name, frankly.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Jaydee mentioned he is living in a flat, and as I mentioned above, it can be difficult getting Virgin set-up in a flat rather than in a house.

[Ambient Sheep]

That's me being definitive and helpful, right there. Make the most of it; equivocation might as well be my middle name, frankly.

Hah, i know what you mean, see:

...it's probably 50/50 as to whether you want to go Virgin or BT for the telephone & internet.  Again, look at the package prices, I'm out of touch on what the best deals are these days...

and

Similarly they do some sort of BT Vision video-on-demand thing which I haven't investigated for the same reason, but you might want to look at if you don't have Sky.  Or even if you do, as I know fuck all about how it compares.  :-)

:-)

Thanks for the further input though, it's food for thought, maybe we'll do it after all.

[Ambient Sheep]

Jaydee mentioned he is living in a flat, and as I mentioned above, it can be difficult getting Virgin set-up in a flat rather than in a house.

Yes, I did register that, and yes it can be.  But there's flats and flats, isn't there?  I could be wrong, but I think there's a big difference Virgin-wise between being in a 20-storey monster and a two-up/two-down jobby.  Certainly when I lived near Cambridge, all the three-storey two-or-was-it-four-on-a-floor flats on my little estate were cabled up (by Cambridge Cable at the time, later NTL, now Virgin), and my ex- from those days now lives in a big five-storey complex of a hundred or so flats in Camrbidge and they're all sorted as well.  So it might already be installed to a box on the wall, it's just that jaydee81 doesn't know it.

So there might well be a problem...or there might not.  Got to be worth looking at, anyway, rather than just saying "No choice there".  You weren't the only offender there, btw, everybody was just saying "BT" and I just thought it seemed a bit one-sided, that's all.


However that wasn't what I had the biggest problem with anyway, you leapt on the wrong thing.  If you must know, it was this:

But because BT is in competition on ADSL broadband with other service providers, there is a bit of choice- but they all at some point go through the same BT service.

_{^{(emphasis mine)}}

Which due to LLU is absolutely not true, unless you're going to pretend you were referring to the couple of miles of copper wire at the end of it all. ;-)  That's the bit that I thought needed clarifying the most.  I nearly confined my original post just to that, but then I thought "Awww fuck it, while I'm here, I might as well do the whole shebang".


Sorry if I'm coming across like a dick, I was trying to be diplomatic in my OP (I chose not to quote you in it) but obviously failed, and since you're now calling me on it, I thought I'd better clear up what I was getting at.  Sorry if there's any hard feelings.

[glitch]

Another vote for BE. Absolutely fantastic, no complaints so far, been with them 2 years. Really helps that we're about 200m from our exchange as we get the full advertised rate. On a decent torrent I can easily get 1Mb/s and that's after I've capped it so my flatmate doesn't get cross.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Yes, I did register that, and yes it can be.  But there's flats and flats, isn't there?

True, but I had a nightmare (well, a mild annoyance) with Virgin. I'm on the third floor of a three storey building, and they came out four times to try and do it - but always found excuses (eg not having the right equipment with them) as to why they couldn't. The fourth guy actually admitted to me that it was just a long and complicated job (which meant going through the room of someone on the second floor) and that it could be done, but they get paid by the installation, and so lose money if it's a big job, and that's why the others had avoided doing it. And then for long and tedious reasons it couldn't be done by him, and I thought fuck this, and went with one of those web and walk thingies. Which is okay, but with a 3 gig download limit per month it means I have to be pretty careful as to how much I use it and I wouldn't really recommend it to others unless they have no choice in the matter.

If I'd known that the £130 cost of installation with o2 would be waived if I went with them I'd have definitely done that - but nothing was said when I enquired about getting it at the time...

[DanRev]

We had similar problems with Virgin installing cable and we live in an easily accessible semi-detached house, so maybe it's just that they're awful.

[Lfbarfe]

Jaydee -  Just checked. You can get O2/Be on LLU. I'd go with them if I were you.

[jaydee81]

Thanks for the advice people. Now what the hell does LLU stand for?

[MojoJojo]

We had similar problems with Virgin installing cable and we live in an easily accessible semi-detached house, so maybe it's just that they're awful.

Hmmm, I've found that the people they send round to do the initial installation seem to be slightly dodgy characters. However, the couple of times I've had to have an engineer round to fix something they've been great.

They're pretty good at organising it all though - fairly flexible with times with mornign and afternoon slots. Send you a reminder txt and everything. Virgin are installing at my house today.

[Mary is not amused]

Now what the hell does LLU stand for?

As sheepy said:

another company (usually Sky or Be) with their own equipment fitted inside the BT exchange that can talk directly down BT's copper to you (a practice known as LLU, Local Loop Unbundling)

Wikipedia has further tedious detail.